Resumen de la ponencia

Cell is an interactive installation by Keiichi Matsuda and James Alliban that plays with and proposes alternative landscapes in the technological ether surrounding our everyday movements. As our identities become deliberately constructed and broadcast commodities, our projected personae increasingly enmesh and define us. Cell acts as a virtual mirror, displaying a constructed fictional persona in place of our physical form. Composed from keyword tags mined from online profiles, these second selves stalk our movements through space, building in size and density over time. The resulting forms are alternate, technologically refracted manifestations of the body, revealing the digital aura while simultaneously allowing us escape from our own constructed identities.

Cell uses Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect to track visitors as they interact with the installation. It was built in openFrameworks, an open-source toolkit originally built to teach artists and designers creative coding. Microsoft have supported the project from the early stages, working with Brighton based company Matchbox Mobile and the openFrameworks community to build a new code library (or addon) specifically for cell that supports the Kinect For Windows SDK. This is an important development in the field of interactive art. Providing openFrameworks users easy access to the official Kinect For Windows SDK, places the technology directly into the hands of a large international community of interaction designers and new media artists. The library will be made available for free online, along with the source code for the installation.

Información acerca del ponente

Keiichi Matsuda (BSc. MArch) is a designer and film-maker. He began working with video during his Masters of Architecture at the Bartlett school (UCL) as a critical tool to understand, construct and represent space. Keiichi’s research examines the implications of emerging technologies for human perception and the built environment, focusing on the integration of media into everyday life. He has a multi-disciplinary approach to his work, using a mixture of video, motion graphics, interaction design, and architecture to create vibrant “hyper-real” environments where the distinctions between physical and virtual start to dissolve.

He has presented his films and research internationally, winning awards for design, drawing and filmmaking, and graduated from his MArch with distinction in summer 2010. He is currently self employed, working on commissions and research projects in London and Tokyo.